The solar system is densely packed with planets and also contains an asteroid and a Kuiper belts, remnants from the planet-formation epoch. Are planetary systems with high-mass planets any different in terms of remnant planetesimal belts from those with low-mass planets or those with no known planets? What does this tell us in terms of planetary system formation and evolution?

Image credit: Lynette Cook

Planetesimals are the building blocks of planets, and mid and far-infrared observations with Spitzer and Herschel indicate that at least 10–25% of mature stars (10 Myr to 10 Gyr) harbor planetesimal disks with disk sizes of tens to hundreds AU (this frequency is a lower limit because the surveys are limited by sensitivity). The evidence for planetesimals comes from the presence of circumstellar dust: because the lifetime of the dust grains (<1 Myr) is much shorter than the age of the star ( >10 Myr), it is inferred that the dust cannot be primordial but must be the result of steady or stochastic dust production generated by the collision, disruption, and/or sublimation of planetesimals, like the asteroids, comets and Kuiper belt objects in our solar system. The presence of these debris disks in both single- and multiple-star systems, and around A- to M-type stars (also around the progenitors of white dwarfs), spanning several orders of magnitude difference in stellar luminosities, imply that planetesimal formation, a critical step in planet formation, is a robust process that can take place under a wide range of conditions. It is therefore not surprising that in some cases planets and debris disks coexist. But are dust-producing planetesimal disks more or less common around stars with planets? Using the evolution of the solar system as a model, in its early history, a star with planetary companions could be expected to be surrounded by a massive debris disk produced by the planetesimal swarm that formed the planets, the latter exciting planetesimal collisions and dust-production while undergoing orbital migration. On the other hand, at a later stage, the star could harbor a sparse dust disk after the dynamical rearrangement of the planets is complete and the planetesimal swarm has undergone significant dynamical clearing. Do observations support these trends?

Because the study of the planet-debris disk correlation could shed light on the formation and evolution of planetary systems and may help “predict” the presence of planets around stars with certain disk characteristics, we have carried out a statistical study of an unbiased sub-sample of the Herschel DEBRIS and DUNES debris disk surveys, to assess whether the frequency and properties of debris disks around a control sample of solar-type stars are statistically different from those around stars with planets. Out of the 466 and 133 stars in the DEBRIS and DUNES samples, respectively, we have selected a subsample of 204 FGK stars located at distances <20 pc (to maximize survey completeness), with ages >100 Myr (to avoid introducing a bias due to disk evolution), and with no binary companions at <100 AU (to avoid introducing a bias due to the observed differences in both disk frequency and planet frequency between singles and multiples). The debris-disk frequency within this unbiased sample is 0.14 +0.3/-0.2 .

In this clean sample, we don’t find any evidence that debris disks are more common or more dusty around stars harboring high-mass planets (> 30 MEarth) compared to the average population. Overall, this lack of correlation can be understood within the context that the conditions to form debris disks are more easily met than the conditions to form high-mass planets, in which case one would not expect a correlation based on formation conditions; this is also consistent with the studies that show that there is a correlation between stellar metallicity and the presence of massive planets, but there is no correlation between stellar metallicity and the presence of debris disks. Another factor contributing to the lack of a well-defined correlation might be that the dynamical histories likely vary from system to system, and stochastic effects need also to be taken into account, e.g., those produced by dynamical instabilities of multiple-planet systems clearing the outer planetesimal belt or the planetesimal belt itself triggering planet migration and instabilities.

Regarding low-mass planets (< 30 MEarth), one would expect that if the planets formed in the outer region and migrated inward, low-mass planets would have been inefficient at accreting or ejecting planetesimals, leaving them on dynamically stable orbits over longer timescales. On the other hand, high-mass planets would have been more efficient at ejecting planetesimals, leaving behind a depleted population of dust-producing parent bodies. Alternatively, if the planets formed in situ, the timescale for the planet to eject the planetesimals would have been shorter in systems with high-mass planets than with low-mass planets. Under both scenarios, from an evolution point of view, one would expect to find a positive correlation between low-mass planets and the presence of a remnant dust-producing planetesimal disk and, in fact, preliminary analyses of the Herschel surveys have found tentative evidence of such correlation. However, our clean sample does not confirm the presence of this correlation. Why? It could be because the true migration histories of the systems studied may be significantly more complicated than the two scenarios described above; for example, in our own solar system, it is now well established that the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, migrated outward over a significant distance to reach their current locations, sculpting the trans-Neptunian population as they did so. Another explanation could be because the planets detected by radial velocity surveys and the dust observed at 100 μm occupy well-separated regions of space, limiting the influence of the observed closer-in planets on the dust production rate of the outer planetesimal belt. But it could also be that our sample is too small to detect such a correlation because having a clean sample that avoids the biases mentioned above comes at a price: in our sample, a positive detection of a correlation could have been detected only if the disk frequency around low-mass planet stars were to be about four times higher than the control sample.

Another aspect that we have explored is the role of planet multiplicity. Dynamical simulations of multiple-planet systems with outer planetesimal belts indicate that there might be a correlation between the presence of multiple planets and debris. This is because the presence of the former indicates a dynamically stable environment where dust producing planetesimals may have survived for extended periods of time (as opposed to single-planet systems that in the past may have experienced gravitational scattering events that resulted in the ejection of other planets and dust-producing planetesimals). However, our sample does not show evidence that debris disks are more or less common, or more or less dusty, around stars harboring multiple-planet systems compared to single-planet systems.

And how do the observed debris disks compared to our solar system? Because our sample does not show any evidence of disk evolution in Gyr timescales, we can look at the distribution of disk fractional luminosities (Ldust/Lstar; a distance-independent variable). We find that a Gaussian distribution of fractional luminosities in logarithmic scale centered on the solar system value (taken as 10-6.5) fits the data well, whereas one centered at 10 times the solar system’s debris disks can be rejected. This is of interest in the context of future prospects for terrestrial planet detection. Even though the Herschel observations presented in this study trace cold dust located at tens of AU from the star, for systems with dust at the solar system level, the dust dynamics is dominated by Poynting–Robertson drag. This force makes the dust in the outer system drift into the terrestrial-planet region. This warm dust can impede the future detection of terrestrial planets due to the contaminant exozodiacal emission. Ruling out a distribution of fractional luminosities centered at 10 times the solar system level implies that there are a large number of debris disk systems with dust levels in the KB region low enough not to become a significant source of contaminant exozodiacal emission. Comets and asteroids located closer to the star are other sources of dust that can contribute to the exozodiacal emission (and for those, Herschel observations do not provide constraints), but planetary systems with low KB dust-type of emission likely imply low-populated outer belts leading to low cometary activity. These results, therefore, indicate that there are good prospects for finding a large number of debris disk systems (i.e., systems with evidence of harboring planetesimals) with exozodiacal emission low enough to be appropriate targets for terrestrial planet searches.

Larger samples are needed to improve the statistics of the studies mentioned above, but, as we have done here, care must be taken to avoid biases. But increasing the sample size is not enough. There are two additional aspects that need to be improved upon and, with the data at hand, cannot be addressed at the moment: our ability to detect fainter debris disks (as we may only have detections for the top 20% of the dust distribution), and to detect or rule out the presence of lower-mass planets to greater distances. For the later, of critical importance is that the planet search teams make the non-detections publicly available so we can identify systems for which the presence of planets of a given mass can be excluded out to a certain distance.

This Month’s Featured Author

Dr. Brian Williams received his B.S. from Florida State University in 2004 and his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in 2010. He was a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for three years, after which he worked as a research scientist at NASA GSFC with Universities Space Research Association. He arrived at STScI in February of 2017, and is currently a Support Scientist in the Science Mission Office. His research interests include supernovae and supernova remnants, shock physics and particle acceleration, and dust in the interstellar medium.